[Book Excerpt] Fake News, 5G and the Virus: Hope and fear in the social smartphone

We live at a time when billions have access to unbelievably powerful technology. The most extraordinary tool that has been invented in the last century, the smartphone, is forcing radical changes in the way we live and work - and unlike previous technologies, it is in the hands of just about everyone.

Coupled with the rise of social media, this has ushered in a new era of deeply personal technology, where individuals now have the ability to work, create and communicate on their own terms, rather than wait for permission from giant corporations or governments. At least that is the optimistic view.

Always ON: Hope and Fear in the Social Smartphone takes readers on an entertaining ride through this turbulent era, as related by Rory Cellan-Jones, tech journalist— an author with a ringside seat to the key moments of the technology revolution. 

We present an exclusive excerpt from the chapter titled Fake News, 5G and the Virus in which the author explores the best and the worst of what smartphones and social media could do for us amidst the Coronavirus crisis.

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Fake News, 5G and the Virus 

This book has been about the conflicting emotions we have felt during an era when technology became more personal. The hope was that it would liberate us, make us wealthier and happier; the fear was that it would endanger our children, undermine our democracy and make giant unaccountable technology companies even more powerful. During the coronavirus crisis, we experienced the best and the worst of what smartphones and social media could do for us. As we have seen, they helped us keep in touch with loved ones and colleagues while forced to stay at home – indeed, many discovered that they could be more productive working at their kitchen table than catching a crowded train to an office building in some city centre. They also helped, in a modest way, the scientists and policymakers looking for a way out of the crisis.

But in the debit column a phenomenon that was already present, misinformation spread by social media, became much more evident and much more dangerous. A tidal wave of lies and hoaxes, rumours and scams swept around the world, spread on WhatsApp and Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and TikTok. A population hungry for information about the coronavirus had a vast number of sources of news that would not have been available if the pandemic had happened before the social smartphone era, but too often they were not reliable.

Among the stories being shared in February 2020 was the idea that coronavirus had been engineered in a lab – either by China or the United States, depending on your politics. Or perhaps its dangers had been exaggerated – it was little more than a mild form of flu. There were dodgy cures and tips: drink more hot water; try not to drink ice; if you can hold your breath for ten seconds and not cough, then you definitely don’t have the virus. These ideas often arrived on phones labelled as coming from ‘my friend who knows a nurse working in ICU’ or ‘a doctor friend who has been talking to colleagues in Northern Italy’. Later, of course, tips such as drinking bleach or taking a new ‘wonder drug’, hydroxychloroquine, came not from fictitious strangers but from world leaders such as Donald Trump or Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

Then there was the theory that one of the world’s biggest philanthropists, a tech billionaire who was spending much of his fortune on trying to improve global health, was up to no good when it came to the coronavirus. Bill Gates, the story went, had a devilish plan to use vaccines as a cover to insert microchips under people’s skin and then control their minds. A TED talk back in 2015 where the Microsoft founder warned, ‘If anything kills over ten million people over the next few decades, it is likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than war,’ was somehow seen as evidence of malevolent intent rather than prescience.

At first, this all might have seemed harmless enough – after all, people have always believed weird and wonderful things about illnesses and how they should be treated. But in an era that saw millions rely for their primary news source on Facebook or WhatsApp, the World Health Organization warned that we were in the middle of an ’infodemic’ that could cause huge damage, perhaps making it less likely that people would trust that a vaccine was safe when one came along.

In late February 2020 an epidemiologist from the University of East Anglia, Paul Hunter, told my Tech Tent programme about the lessons learned from the Ebola virus in West Africa in 2016. Very similar rumours to those around the coronavirus had spread: that it was all a hoax, that it was a money-making exercise, that wearing masks and other protective equipment was just an overreaction.

‘People who believed conspiracy theories about Ebola were less likely to adopt safe practices, especially safe funeral practices. And so they were putting themselves at an increased risk of getting the infection and ultimately increased risk of dying.’

But by the time of the coronavirus pandemic there was one new conspiracy theory that was more deluded, yet apparently also more widespread, than any other – and it concerned the very technology that was going to make spreading information around the world via smartphones even easier and faster: 5G, it alleged, was behind the coronavirus. It turned out that in Wuhan, where COVID-19 originated, a huge array of 5G masts had been turned on just a few weeks earlier – or at least that was the claim.

From this original lightbulb going off in someone’s head, multiple stories about the links between 5G and the virus took off. When hundreds of passengers on cruise ships came down with COVID-19 it was obviously caused by their brand-new communications systems, which must have featured 5G. Then there was the idea that actually the coronavirus was nothing more serious than the common cold, and what 5G did was weaken the immune system so that the body could not deal with it. And it was no good pointing out that the virus was spreading in countries like Iran where 5G had not been rolled out.’ That’s what you think,’ said one of the more extreme conspiracy-mongers, adamant that 5G was being developed as a secret weapon around the world.

As well as some of social media’s more exotic characters, the 5G virus theory was also being pushed by celebrities, among them one of Britain’s best-known television hosts. In an exchange with the ITV Good Morning programme’s consumer editor Alice Beer, who described the theory as ’not true’ and ‘incredibly stupid’, Eamonn Holmes had this to say: ‘What I don't accept is mainstream media immediately slapping that down as not true when they don’t know it’s not true. It’s very easy to say it is not true because it suits the state narrative.’

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